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- Note effort underway: Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles.
Some larger part in the future of the English Wikipedia will be played by the "missing articles" issue.[1] While those who work on Featured Articles are at one extreme of the project, concerned with pushing the quality of articles as far as possible, the other side of the way we judge any encyclopedia is certainly its comprehensiveness: the sheer power of very broad coverage speaks for itself, once you start consulting a reference work. Not only is this side of our project less obviously prominent (which is inevitable), it is much less discussed in detail, meaning conceptually, technically, and in terms of project management and co-ordination. Even the basic aims of working on missing articles are still up for grabs.
A major source of lists of topics is other reference works: listings that are prima facie encyclopedic can be extracted from any reputable specialist encyclopedia. Where such an encyclopedia is free of copyright (e.g. public domain works), or (for example) is another reference wiki under the GFDL, it is in theory possible to merge it into enWP.
Experience shows that not to be as easy as it may sound. This essay tries to develop some basic theory. As working title for the encyclopedia being merged in, take EV (Encyclopedia of Various).